


if all we are is flesh and bone; find me in the bloodshed

by VerdantMoth



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Avengers Family, Canon-Typical Violence, Deaf Clint Barton, Found Family, Loose Adaptation of Berserker Mythology, Magical Elements, Mentions of Myth & Folklore, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Non-Graphic Violence, Nonbinary Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 07:40:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25467148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VerdantMoth/pseuds/VerdantMoth
Summary: Sometimes Asset moves like the puppet he is. When the sun has scorched his calcium armor into a brittle cage, he is unable to move with silent ease.Then doctors strap him down to a table made of stone and metal and ancient, and they break him. Doctors burn the flesh from his muscles, break every bone, inside and outside, and they take his memories with white fire that tastes like iron.He never remembers what his last frame looked like, is never allowed more than stolen glimpses of his new faces.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 16
Kudos: 29





	if all we are is flesh and bone; find me in the bloodshed

**Author's Note:**

> i do not speak many languages and trying to translate imaginary monikers is hard. i apologize if i butchered them, and also if anyone wants to send how they'd translate it, please hit me up!

He has not tasted his own name since he fell to the earth and was buried under the frozen waters. He has not seen his face, since he woke, since the bleached bones were sewn into his skin, since borrowed flesh was glued to his own. 

He doesn’t remember if he was human before, or just other. 

He does not even have a name to call himself, aside from the one the bloodshedders gifted him, _Asset._

But he has heard rumors of the clan in the woods; rumors of a family of _Le_ _s Farouche_ made up of bone and metal and rot.

They walk between death and life, switch between the skin of the beast and the skin of the, not mortal. 

He is stalked by shadows, half-human beast who click and tick and fly around him, leading him, guiding him. There has been a strange shadow above him, silent, since he started walking.

He does not know the taste of his name, does not know the reflection of his face, but if anyone can find the _other_ beneath the bloodshed that holds the Asset together, it will be _Le_ _s Farouche_.

-

He remembers a girl, a tiny thing, so small that when the scientist fitted the skull of the wolf to the sharp planes of her face, they found it too big. They frowned, conspired with the guards, and when it became obvious she would stay small, they found a face to fit her. Long, narrow, with sharply curved horns the scientist coated in a metal that never warmed and stayed as dark as night.

The scientist called her вдова _._ They called her the Widow, not because of what she lost, but because of what she took from others. 

Asset fought beside her, and he was never sure if the red of her hair was blood or dye or genetic. Fire, maybe, but from where? She adapted well to the armour-of-bone, adapted well to wearing the flesh of the others. 

She stepped into borrowed skin like it was a pair of comfortable sleep pants, and stepped out of it as easy as a robe.

Sometimes, Asset wondered if the Guards knew they did not control her the way they assumed. The Widow _liked_ the rattle of her skeleton-dress, like the eerie hollowness of the bleached skull mask. When she whispered her threats, they funneled out of the pointed mouth and wove around rooms from every corner. 

“One day,” she’d tell him, “I’ll show you my face.”

He stabbed her, because that is what the borrowed fingers of his gloves were commanded to do.

He missed her heart, because that is what _his_ bones wished for. 

“Find me,” she laughed at him, a gurgling, red soaked noise. “Find me, and the others, and see who you once were.”

No amount of bleach ever washed the kiss from his lips.

-

Sometimes Asset moves like the puppet he is. When the sun has scorched his calcium armor into a brittle cage, he is unable to move with silent ease. 

Then doctors strap him down to a table made of stone and metal and _ancient_ , and they break him. Doctors burn the flesh from his muscles, break every bone, inside and outside, and they take his memories with white fire that tastes like iron. 

He never remembers what his last frame looked like, is never allowed more than stolen glimpses of his new faces. 

They are not the bones of one beast, never the skull of one innocent. 

They always sew his mouth shut, no matter the jaws, with a metal that seeps into his blood, silver and burning. 

Ice in his veins that never runs dry, never melts.

When he wakes, broken and made whole, his feet go where he is guided, and his hands break whomever he is ordered.

Despite this, he thinks maybe he was beautiful once. Because the patchwork fragments of bones always curve over a sharp jaw, and the doctors never bother with the black braids forever curling down his back.

They do not steal with winter from his eyes, grey and empty and absent inside the borrowed faces. 

_Odd_ , Asset thinks, when thoughts are something he’s allowed, _odd that they do not take my eyes and trade them for the creatures who see in the dark_.

He moves in the dark well enough, blind and deaf and starved. 

He moves in the dark and he makes his own light with the silver fire in his veins and he makes his own music with the skeleton shirt he wears. He gnaws on the wire that keeps him hungry, wets his lips with tears of victims he’ll never forget.

When he runs, the forests laugh at the disjointed jeering of arms and legs held together with cheap leather and commandment. 

-

The Asset doesn’t think he means to escape.

He’s not even sure it counts as escape, when all he did was _keep on walking_. He ends up in a land that is green but sea salted, all cliff edges and famine soaked. 

Pas the horrified children milling in the park, beyond the cobbled streets where butchers chase him for his flesh. 

Into the mountains that sparks nightmares and myths.

The Asset is haunted, has been since the Widow laughed her way into the shadows. 

There’s a beast, a horrific daydream of a creature, bathed in a golden glow. It’s eyes are blue like the faded sky above the cornsilk field. 

The Asset knows this creature, has lain beside the creature when he was a man. A boy. Small, runt, sick. 

Now, _now_ , he wears the face of a bear, the furs draped over broad shoulders and golden heat crown under the mantle of the beast. 

Now he is truly a man, but there’s a fury in him that roars out. Despite his slow, lumbering grace, he moves swift, blends into the trees. 

The Asset follows this ghost, and maybe he’s gone mad.

Maybe he doesn’t know this feral beast; or rather, maybe the beast is the ghost of one of the Asset’s many faces. 

Villages call him Iompróidh-Fireann, _Bear-Man_ , and they draw his image across their thresholds.

“The man with the face of the bear protects this home,” they chant across the green aisles. 

-

It is not just the Iompróidh-Fireann who circles the Asset on his journey. 

He’s seen the boy too, heard the skittering of the scorpion's tale. This creature who prowls the sandy beaches.

It’s wrong though, this the Asset knows. 

The sharp fangs, the jaws should not fit over the young man’s face so well. 

_Magic_ , the Widow had whispered once. _Your cross, it messes with the magic, keeps the animal from feasting on your ribs. Magic allows the skull to grow, to fit, allows the spirits to merge._

Magic, the Asset knows, has danced with this young man. He makes the sign of the cross they ripped off him too long ago to recall.

Widow must have been right, because his skull shifts a little when he makes the sign squeezes a bit too tight.

It’s fitting though, the spider-ink vein map across his chest. Strange, the metal joints, the gears that click at the end of the scorpion tail. 

When he drops onto the Asset, the Asset is shocked. “Homem Aranha, but you’re just a boy.” He is not the great revered Spider Man the Asset was expecting.

The chittering clack of the boys’ graceful steps is more horrific than the wailing of the innocents. “I was a boy, when she found me. I am,” Homem Aranha pauses, fangs whirring clicking and a strange metal chirping echoing in his spindly chest. “I am remade now, am nothing and everything.”

“Why do you hunt me?” the Asset demands.

Brown eyes, sun-burnt whiskey wood, blink in steady ticks, “It is you, Iarnă, who hunt us.”

The boy, metal-man, _scorpianspider_ , bites him, and the silver fire in his veins is frozen by something soft and green and _cold_.

He sleeps, and when he wakes, he is oceans from the sandy beaches he last walked. 

-

He wakes and the roads are just rivers, the buildings ancient. The cross burns here too, the city is full of them.

But the Asset is not here for prayers and penance. 

He is here for the stories of La Fenice di Metallo. _The Metal Phoenix_. His wings are steel razors and his heart a gruesome conglomeration of metal and wire and muscle. 

Images of bone and metal, of a bird sharp beak and eyes that glow red like gemstones carved from deep in the volcanoes, are littered across the sails of every passing ship.

This is a man of song and of legend. 

This is a man kissed by the Widow, but built with his own hands. 

The Asset _means_ to cut him down, but he’s still surprised when the blood flows red. “I thought it’d be the black rainbow of oil, or maybe the gold of gasoline,” the Asset says in awe.

“We are human, beneath these shells,” La Fenice di Metallo crows. 

He ticks and clanks, and the sharp metal wings that slice the Asset’s arm from it’s socket are _blinding_. 

The Asset is also unprepared to be bowled over by Iompróidh-Fireann, meaty claws swiping the Asset’s face, tearing off the bone faceplate he wears. 

“Slow there, he meant no harm,” La Fenice di Metallo ticks out. “He’s still finding the face beneath the skull.”

“He should know better than to attack those who are mine.” Iompróidh-Fireann growls. 

“Possessive,” La fenice di Metallo ticks back, but he sounds amused, and the metal seems to blush, despite being metal. “Run along now, Iarnă, you’ve others to meet before вдова calls you home and finds your old face.”

The shock comes from nowhere and everywhere, and the Asset’s mouth melts until there’s nothing but yellowed bone mottled with wire below his eyes.

-

The Asset is wandering a field of lavender. He doesn’t know how long it has been, how long he has walked, but his boots are filled with blood.

Some of it must be his own.

He’s _hungry_ , feral with the sharp pangs in his belly. 

He splits his own jaw and gorges on dirt and storm and days old vermin dead on the roads. Something is following him again. Some daymare is _always_ following him, but the Asset can find no trace of mortal in this creature. 

Le Métallurgiste Garçon moves like his creator, all ticking steps and chiming heartbeats. The Metalwork Boy stares at the Asset between lavender fields and his eyes are copper and his face smoothed brass. Platinum and Steel gears spin and shift on one half, curved over the wire brain like a strange half-crown. 

He is beautiful crafted, smooth full lips that never move with the buoyant laughter. “I am Harley,” he speaks. His voice is wrong. Warm but stilted. “I am Harley, and you are almost home, Iarnă.”

“Why do you call me that,” the Asset begs. “That name, it means nothing to me.”

“Maman is waiting for you, Winter,” Harley says again. Such boyish sounds, from such a bulky body. 

Smooth metal, broad shoulders, a sharp waist. “Do you all have names?” the Asset, Iarnă, wonders. 

“Not Maman. But Papa used to be called Antonio before he buried metal in his chest. Mon père, Stíofán.” 

The Asset must look confused, because Harley adds, “Steve, I believe, is the name you knew him under.”

“I knew him?”

“Have you met my brother,” Harley suddenly interrupts. The multicolored body shifts, looks almost like it is bouncing, as much as the heavy metal plates can _bounce_. “Have you met Peter? Papa, he did not build Peter as he built me. Peter’s soul already had flesh. Papa just enhanced some of it.” 

The Asset frowns and he says, “La Fenice di Metallo _made_ you?”

Harley’s head titles, and the Asset can hear a faint whirring, humming beat. His heart. “I do not know. Maman saved us all, plucked their minds from the skeletons they were trapped in. Papa says I had bones once too, but they were-” 

Harley’s whole being stiffens, unnatural eyes glowing, dimming, in a strange sequence. “Maman is ready for you, but you have one more to find first. Come, Iarnă, Winter, _find him_ , so we can find _you_.”

-

The Asset chews on the names _Les Farouche_ have given him. Iarnă, Winter. The names taste like ice from the mountains, like mint. Like a hope so desperate it steals breath from brittle and broken ribs. 

He chews it, cracks jaws that are not his own again and again, and replaces them from graves fresh turned. 

It was easier when the mad doctors did this. When the split men’s faces opened, they found matched sets of teeth to fill the gaps. 

Iarnă, Winter, has never been good at puzzles. His left cheek is too small, his forehead bows out. The bone is all different colors, the face _monstrous_ in it’s familiar semi-humanity.

He is not being followed, not this time.

[Mx. Bonehawk] has no songs, no whispered fables. [Mx. Bonehawk] moves in absolute silence, and people write out the fables on ticket stubs and circus adverts. 

They don’t even wear the face of a hawk, as far as the Asset can tell. Their beak, four feet long and needle sharp is closer to that of a crane. But their eyes are sharp, their aim as deadly as a hawk. 

Still, the Asset would very much like for them to “Come down.”

Rot crusted feathers rain over the Asset. 

[Winter,] Mx. Bonehawk says with their fingers. [Are you ready to come home?]

“Home is not here,” the Asset answers. He does not remember much of home. Home is beautiful mountains, deep, clear lakes. Home is green spring and frozen winter, and people always starved. 

Mx. Bonehawk doesn’t hear him, until they tap their ears. They still speak with their fingers, but a strange squawking voice now accompanies the fast movements. [You will never go back there, not as the boy you left as.]

The Asset shakes his head. “No, no she _promised_ that she would help me find myself.”

[Yes, as you are now. Not as you were _before_ you wore another man’s bones.]

The Asset snarls, a noise that could compete with Iompróidh-Fireann, if not as deep.

[Please, Iarnă, you cannot expect to wear someone else's face and still lay claim to your own?] Eyes like blue sea glass look at him with a seriousness disjointed from the lazy stance. They reach for him, reach for the yellowed bones circled like manacles about his wrist. [Come, let the Widow bring you back.]

“Back to where, if not to me, if not to home?” the Asset demands. He is hungry, his bones are broken. He needs meat in his belly and a new skin to wear. Mx. Bonehawk’s feathers look soft enough, their legs meaty enough.

[Back to us, of course.] Mx. Bonehawk steps closer, carefully removes the bird skull from their brows, and they are _beautiful,_ with blue sea-glass eyes, and honeywheet hair. [Back to me, Bucky.]

-

Before the Asset was a skeleton puppet moving under many aliases, he was a boy with a bright smile and one name. His parents called him _James_ and he was happy. He doesn’t remember much from this time, doesn’t remember much aside from a sickly friend named Steve, the sweet juice of a purple fruit, and the smokes of war and plunder, choking him as he fell into his icey coffin.

But when Mx. Bonehawk says, signs, squawks that name, _Bucky_ , the Asset’s body is set aflame. Silver fire moulds to the bones inside of him, sizzles and cracks through layers and layers of skin that is not his own. 

He screams with it, shatters the boneplate wired to his jaw, claws at the faces of every man, woman, child he has worn. 

There are hands on him, _human_ hands, a metal pair. They are clean, they are uncovered.

 _Les Farouche_ pin him to a table made of the most simple wood, cleansed and untainted. 

Again and again the Widow peels off his armour. One hundred times she breaks his wrist, breaks his legs. 

Peter and Harley, they’re so young, and he begs her to send them away.

“Do not taint them with the carnage,” he weeps.

Widow smiles at him as she scrapes foreign muscles from beneath his chin. “Iarnă, please. They may wear the smiles of the youth, but their hearts, their minds, they are as tortured as your own.”

When he vomited, it is not the bile and blood he expected.

It is so much worse, ink-rot and gore, chunks of things long fermented, oil soaked in his gut. 

Forgotten death in the bowls of _Winter_.

Steve, burly as the bear whose face he wears as a helmet shatters the Asset’s spine. He digs out lines of rune, threads of coerced murder. Sharp claws dig into the softest parts of _Bucky_ , and Tony burns a trail behind the scars. “They excavated deep, Nat, Maman,” Peter tickets out beyond his fathers. “Are you sure they left anything behind?”

Bucky, Winter, he only knows Mx. Bonehawk speaks by the response. “I meant no offense, just, he’s _suffering_ so much. Are you sure you’re prepared for whatever is left of him?”

“Enough, Peter,” Steve says, and without the bear jaw in his way, his voice is softer, kinder. 

“Focus, Peter,” Tony chides. His voice is sharper without the metal beak, but still just as flighty.

It goes like this for days, six feral creatures digging through his mind, breaking apart the body he’s trapped in. He vomits up years of foreign names, of identities that were borrowed. _Stolen_ probably. 

Harley ticks and chirps and whirs beside him, bright eyes eternally glowing. “Show him, his face.”

Widow snaps at him, black metal horns sparking with rage. “He isn’t ready,” her hollow voice crawls down the skull’s pointed mouth. “That will break him further.”

[It is no longer your choice,] Mx. Bonehawk says in that strange squawking voice, fingers fluttering just beyond the Asset’s vision. [He is no longer yours, Natasha. He is _mine_ and I _want him back_. I found him, I hunted him. I saved him, brought him to you.]

The Asset, Bucky, Iarnă.

When the glass is placed before his eyes, he’s not sure what to expect. Someone stares back at him. The man has a strong jaw and ink soaked hair. Has eyes like ice-slush, grey with soot, and lips stained bloody. There’s metal pierced through the bridge of his nose, a strange thin thing staples down the side, but it’s a good nose. 

“Who is he?” Bucky demands. 

[That is you. That is who you were.]

“I don’t like it. I don’t want it. He is _foreign_ to me. Give me back my bone-mask.” Bucky struggles on the table, and five sets of hands struggle to contain him. 

“Clint!” The Widow snaps. “Step away from him now. Bucky, look!” She removes the bones from her own face, and sea blue eyes restrain him. Her hair is as red as he remembers, clean enough that it must get its color from the flame inside of her. “Look at the bones you once wore.”

Bucky stares in horror at the man’s skull. Patchwork bones, splinters from thousands of graves in a frightening mockery of what a human skull might look like, yellowed and greyed, white and brown and stained.

“Find me another," he croaks out. "I do not know how to be human anymore.”

-

 _Les Farouche_ , The Ferals, they hide in the shadows of the world. They chase the monsters who would seek to feast on the dreams of the people. 

They do not stay within any mortal boundaries. The seas do not hold them back.

Stories and myths, legends, rumors, they all say The Seven Ferals aren’t _human_. That they wear animal furs and feathers to disguise the monsters beneath.

_The Wolf, he is the worst. He fit the skull across his face while the animal’s heart still beat. Pulled the furs off and wore them while the blood was still warm. The Wolf is the worst, moving as sharp as winter, and his death is the cruelest. But should you ever attempt to tame the wolf, the Bonehawk will descend and pluck your eyes from your face while you beg._

The fables, they bother Bucky.

There is truth in them, much truth. He doesn’t remove the Wolf’s mantle until he is nestled beside Clint in their bed. But he is not the bringer of death the Asset was. The Wolf’s job is only to save.

The Spirit of the Wolf, the beast inside the bones he dons, guides his movements, softens his steps, but _he_ is not the puppet creature he once was. He choose to follow, to maim. 

_Les Farouche_ are not feral monsters stealing souls, but rather heroes borrowing from the spirits who have always tried to help.

The Wolf might be a hundred destinies inside one man, but they all have the same mission now. _Protect._


End file.
